Awards

All Quiet on the Western Front is a Photocopy of a Photocopy

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The last time a filmed adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front was nominated for Best Picture, Variety suggested distribution by the League of Nations, its premiere was sabotaged by Hitler’s Brownshirts, and the film was banned in Australia for fear that it would undermine faith in the military. Its then-radical pacifistic message proved to be a prescient omen between two World Wars and the filmmaking language it’s credited with inventing became a blueprint for the entire war genre subsequent to its release. 

The 2022 remake, a German-language Netflix production from relatively unknown director Edward Berger, attempts to argue for existence on the same grounds. A war in Ukraine and apparent proximity to nuclear catastrophe would suggest the need for a reminder of the horrors of war. In reality, the new All Quiet on the Western Front represents a lateral step in the history of the war film; it ironically retreads the same path of the genres’ previous decades while undercutting its own premise through distanced filmmaking and attempts at distinction. 

The 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front opens cleverly, depicting a horrifying battle through the eyes of non-characters, all rapidly dying. Very quickly, we realize that the continuity between the opening and the main plot is the uniforms, taken off the dead men before being washed and recycled for the next stage of recruits.

Arts & Culture

Self-Reflection: Eye in the Sky

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If Britannia once ruled the waves, America now indisputably rules the skies, and its aerial power is growing ever more precise. First, the USAAF of 1945, then an adjunct limb of the ground forces, could drop phosphorous bombs with impunity on every exposed inch of Dresden. Two decades later, napalm could be used to raze thin stretches of settled and foxhole-littered jungle in Vietnam, sans, supposedly, excessive civilian loss of life. Now, a house in a Kenyan neighborhood can be pinpointed and destroyed from kilometers above with the latest in predator drone technology. This is as much a moral as it is a technological evolution, and it is a moral dilemma which lies at the heart of Eye in the Sky, given limited release in select theaters in the United States this past month.